Guest Blog: A Foray into the Dead Poets’ Society

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I’m thrilled about today’s guest blogger because she can delve into an aspect of writing in which I have absolutely zero knowledge or expertise. Wille K. Everhart is here to discuss her take on the art of poetry with us. It’s fascinating and I’m thankful she took the time to pen such a well thought out post for us.

A little about Wille: She received her MA in English from Radford University in Radford, VA, where she now serves as a member of adjunct faculty.  Her poetry, a study in the ironies of life, has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including EXIT-109, ALCA-lines, SONGS OF LAMENT, and most recently, the latest edition of RAVING DOVE.  She also writes short fiction and is currently working on her second novel.

 

Thanks for coming, Wille, and I’ll let you take over!

 

During a recent discussion of the merits of poetry, someone suggested that writing poetry was a dead art.  Dead?  Maybe.  For some reason, most readers and, for that matter, most literary agents associate poetry with stuffy rooms filled with eggheads.  You know, those tweed-coated, horn-rim glasses wearing types.  Poetry, the original fiction, has taken a backseat to the novel and been relegated to the halls of academia where learned men and women spend their days spouting profundities.  By modern standards, the poets of the past would surely have to maintain their day jobs in order to pay the bills or eat.  Poetry, my friends, has a bad rep.

 

 

On the other hand, poetry continues, not only in terms of sonnets and villanelles but peppered across the pages of that latest best seller.  For the fiction writer, exercises in poetic muscles allow for instinctive uses of well-turned phrases and clever descriptive passages that leave the reader spellbound.  The average reader may not realize that there’s poetry in that detective novel. They may not understand that the poetic nature of the romance writer’s language is what made their heart pound when the hero swept the damsel in distress off her feet, but whether they knew it or not, it was poetry that sparked their reactions.

 

Perhaps I’m prejudiced.  After all, poetry is my first love, that thing that sustains my spirit through times of great stress.  I discovered my poetic nature late in life; I was forty-three when I penned my first real verse.  My youngest child had been killed and I found myself floundering in the work-a-day world, so after a long discussion with my now late husband, I returned to school.  While there, I took a poetry course.  The professor, Louis Gallo, gave me my head and allowed me the luxury of painting the images of my grief with words. 

 

Images?  I use this term because, by my definition, that’s what poetry is: the images of life.  In artistic terms, fiction writing is Rembrandt, a clearly formed delineation of the subject.  On the other hand, poetry is Monet, vague expressions of color and form that require close examination to determine where one piece of the subject ends and the next begins.  Poetry allows for very different interpretations from individual readers, each one bringing their own life experience to the page.  One reader might view my work as an expression of a mother’s loss.  Another might find the loss of romantic love.  Still another might see it as isolationist, a study in loneliness.  All three of these would-be readers follow the same lines, but all three see what they want to see, what their brain determines as true meaning.  These same readers, during a book club discussion, will build the structure of a novel, coming up with the same basic plot line, the same main characters, and the same turning point in the action. The novelist provides the structure, the face of the Mona Lisa.  The poet gives us the outline, a woman whose features must be painted by the reader.

 

So, now we come to the big question:  can poetry survive?  I think so.  I think there will always be a poet lurking, standing off, observing the scene of life, and that poet will construct the vague outline, the image of what he or she sees.  Will poetry every rise to the heights of Blake or Keats?  Probably not.  Everything changes.  Poetry is now on the streets and in recording studios where rap artists spout it in rhythm with the guitar or drums.  It’s in poetry jams, where student poets climb on chairs and shout their frustration in rhyme and meter.  It will remain in the great halls of academia and in literary magazines, and some of us will cling to the past and write lyric verse.  The poet will always find a place for that metaphor.  He or she will find a place for that simile they’d always wanted to use…..”like Nefertiti in the dark.”

 

 

Interested in what other guest bloggers have to say? Check out Arachne Jericho’s lessons on writing serial fiction.

 

 

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Tags: ALCA-lines, Blake, Dead Poets' Society, Exit-109, guest blog, Keats, lyric verse, Nefertiti in the dark, poetry, poets, Radford University, Raving Dove, Songs of Lament, Wille K. Everhart